Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

Lucinda Everett enjoys this Seventies show about sex that suggests just how far we haven't come, though finds its message increasingly lost in the medium

When The Wardrobe Ensemble started devising a show about sex, they soon realised there was a bigger picture to consider. It was one which encompassed gender, identity, power and equality. And it wasn’t pretty. As co-director Tom Brennan writes in the show’s programme (a radical zine of essays, illustrations and provocations): “Things are bad. […] What can we do? How can we move forward?” The next breathless 60 minutes are the theatrical embodiment of Brennan’s comments: part bleak reality check, part subtle call-to-action.

Given its focus on the future, the show’s Seventies setting initially seems odd, but it turns out to be the first of many smart moves from this nine-strong, award-winning company. As a caricatured Seventies liberal opens the show with a eulogy on the decade’s virtues – sexual freedom, second-wave feminism, gender fluidity – a line-up of youths sit looking as self-confident and sexually-liberated as a reclusive teenager at his first school disco. It is painfully familiar; in the purportedly progressive Noughties, we’re about to see how far we haven’t come.

'1972: The Future of Sex' at Shoreditch Town HallCredit:
Jack Offord

With an electric guitarist providing both pop hits from the era and original numbers, a flurry of stories begins. Yorkshire lad and Bowie fan, Anthony, is stealing his mother’s clothes and calling himself Anton; Christine is hours from losing her virginity and wandering Soho in a tangle of yearning and terror; Penny is in lust with her burly, feminist university professor; and Anna has just met gorgeous Tessa.

Under Brennan and Jesse Jones’s slick direction, the uniformly talented cast whirls in and out of the acting space, shape-shifting between roles: they leapfrog into the future to add contemporary sexual conundrums to the conversation; dance and perform abstract movement sequences; and they stop at the microphones encircling the stage to provide narration, inner monologues, and irreverent singing. Each scene is allowed only brief moments to breathe.

'1972: The Future of Sex' at Shoreditch Town HallCredit:
Jack Offord

The fearless creativity on show is undoubtedly intoxicating and often very funny. Penny receives terrifying sex advice from a cheery dance troupe, and a narrator reveals that smooth-guy Rich has kissed only three girls, one of whom was his cousin. But, at times, it feels as if we are witnessing a showcase of every theatrical form this adroit company has mastered. The key message begins to elude us, slinking off into a stylistic maze.

Thankfully, we are returned to our senses by some moments of beautiful stillness. The strongest sees Anton’s monosyllabic father grasping for the words to tell him he is loved no matter what.

Unsurprisingly given Brennan’s comments, not every story ends in the Seventies ideal, and news from the future isn’t much more heartening. It’s a grim truth to face, but one worth talking about.